Massive Update: Salmon, Cookies, Spider, and Chile Rellenos!

Oh god, these last few weeks have been busy. Just haven't had the time to update what with school and all.

This is what has happened since:

• Wrote 3 papers
• Took 2 tests
• Finished my photo story on Barsana Dham. Pictures of that soon, I hope? Maybe.

And here are some of the things I cooked since:


This is a sear-roasted lemon butter salmon fillet served over couscous. First time attempting to "sear" something. I didn't get that brown crust I wanted, unfortunately. And this isn't really a fillet-sized serving, but meh. I seasoned it with salt and pepper, stuck pieces of butter on top, wrapped them in aluminum foil and put them in the oven for about 20 minutes. Afterwards, I squeezed some fresh lemon onto them. And it was my first time cooking couscous, which is absolutely delicious. Couscous looks like rice but it's actually a pasta. I stove-cooked it in a chicken broth butter mixture for 5 minutes, then tossed in diced tomatoes, chopped parsley, chopped scallions, and finely grated smoked cheddar. Put a lid on it, let it sit, and served it under the fillet.


Chocolate Chip Cookies. This was actually kind of an "original" recipe. Rachel and I took the recipe for the dough and deviated significantly. We added nutella to the dough, added some milk. We sprinkled dark chocolate bits onto the top along with sliced almonds (which toasted nicely in the oven) and there it is! Chocolate cookies. They disappeared so fast.


Now, today!
Oh man, I was just watching TLC (Jon and Kate + Eight, I think) and this guy started crawling in front of the television. He startled me! Look at those eyes. Cute, yes?


But I'm terrified of brown recluses so I got my more brave roommate to kill it for me with Raid. Fortunately, it wasn't a brown recluse. Unfortunately, we may have killed it despite the fact that after spraying, we decided to catch it and set it back outside.

And for my chile rellenos!! My blog will never be a food blog without posting the recipes that I use but food blogging is not my aim. I'm a photo blog. I just happen to be cooking a lot. Anyways, for this, I took a lot of pictures throughout so I might as well do the recipe thing. These took me forever to make. It's a long process. But it was good.

Chile Rellenos with Tomato-Avocado Salsa

For the chile rellenos:

• 4 poblano peppers
• olive oil
• a nice big block of your favorite cheese.
• 3 eggs
• a pinch of salt
• about 2 or 3 cups of vegetable oil

For the salsa:

• 4 roma tomatoes, diced
  
• 2 haas avocados, diced
  
• 1/2 medium red onion, finely chopped
• juice of 1 (or 2) limes
• 2 tbs vegetable oil
• 2 tbs honey
• 3 tbs cilantro
• salt and pepper
  

1) You need to take your peppers and roast them in the oven. It doesn't matter if they're poblanos or anaheims. I used poblanos but I don't know the difference between the two yet, in terms of taste. They just need not be bell peppers. So how to roast? Take a baking pan, put some aluminum foil on them. Put your peppers on them, giving them room. Drizzle olive oil onto them so that they retain their moisture (if you have a brush, even better! Brush 'em down!). Stick them in the oven at 350 degrees for 40 minutes to an hour. Check them periodically throughout. When they start blackening on the tops, rotate them using the stem.

2) While your peppers are roasting, let's make a sauce to eat it with. How about a tomato-avocado salsa? Ok good. So you take 4 tomatoes, dice them, and put them in a large bowl. I used Roma.

3) Next, take 2 Haas avocados, dice those and stick them in the bowl. In case you don't know, you take a knife and start cutting down the middle of the avocado until you hit the pit. Then just start making your way around the seed with the knife. Once all the way around, just take the two halves and twist. They will split easily. Then take the sharp side of your knife and stick it into the seed and just pull out. Take each half of the avocado, using your knife to make vertical and horizontal lines in the fruit. Take a spoon, scoop them out and put them into your bowl with the tomatoes.

4) Take half of a medium red onion and finely chop it! Stick those into the bowl.

5) Squeeze the juice of 1 or two limes into the bowl as well.

6) Put into the mixture 2 tbs of vegetable oil.

7) Put in 2 tbs of honey (mmmm). The original recipe called for 2 tsps but I misread it and put in 2 tbs. It turned out to be a very sweet salsa. Which I liked very much.

8) Now, this is a salsa right? So it MUST have cilantro? Well, I don't like cilantro so I skipped this step. But if you want, put in 3 tbs of cilantro.

9) Season with salt and pepper to taste.

10) Combine all of them gently until the oils and juices and chopped everythings are all incorporated, making sure not to crush the avocado cubes or tomatoes.

Here's what it looks like. It's really nice and sweet and everything mixes very well. It's a little green because the avocado kinda dissolves into the oils. No big. Stick your salsa in the fridge for later. Anyways, once your peppers are done roasting, they should look like this:

Those are what they look like afterwards.

11) Stick them in a large bowl and cover the bowl with saran wrap. Let it sit there for about 20 minutes. Allowing them to steam like this loosens the skins so that twenty minutes later it just comes right off. Then you just peel them.

12) Okay, go over to your cutting board. Take a knife and cut a little pocket halfway down the peppers, being very careful not to tear other parts of the flesh. You want to take a spoon and scoop out all the inner white membranes and seeds. Discard those nasties.

13) Take your cheese and cut them into rectangular prism things the size of your peppers. I used Habanero Cheddar but it's really up to you.

14) Okay now to make the batter. Take 3 eggs (approx 1 egg for every 2 peppers if you want to know the ratio if you're making more) and pour only the whites into a mixing bowl.


This is the hard part... unless you have a blender, mixer, whatever. We need these egg whites whipped so that the batter will be light and fluffy. Since I didn't have any machine to do this, I had to hand-whip it with my trusty whisk! 15 minutes later and a right arm terribly sore, I've whipped those bad boys:

Do it until it's pretty much solid.

15) Take your egg yolks and fold them into the whipped egg whites. Add some salt if you like!

16) Take some vegetable oil in a large stew pot and heat it up real nice on the stove

17) Take some flour in a little bowl thing. You want to take your stuffed peppers, coat them lightly in flour. Make sure it's all covered up. You need it all nice and floured so that the batter you made with the egg whites will stick to your pepper. So after you run it through the flour, stick it in the batter, and then stick it into your hot oil and watch them sizzle and fry!

Just take them out when they're nice and brown. It takes just a couple minutes on each side.

18) Stick them onto a plate with paper towels so that they will soak up the excess oil.

19) When you're done. Stick it on a plate, and pour some of that salsa over it!

Presentation's not the best, but it tasted wonderful so it doesn't matter. I don't even like tomatoes but they were good in the salsa.

There's that. I know this isn't the authentically Mexican way to prepare this, but this is just my variation on the chile relleno.

Until next time!